health

Book review – Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive

7-minute read
keywords: immunology, popular science

Our lives depend on a functioning immune system, but few of us understand how it works. And fewer still can explain it because, to quote Ed Yong: “immunology is where intuition goes to die“. Thus, Philip Dettmer, the creator of the wildly successful popular science YouTube channel Kurzegsagt, has written this chunky book. An entertaining crash course in immunobiology, it does a wonderful job at introducing all the moving parts that make up this byzantine system.

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Book review – The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer

7 -minute read

Fifty years ago, US President Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer” when he signed the National Cancer Act. Despite fantastic progress on some fronts, overall it is clear that we are not winning this battle. Cancer remains one of the leading causes of human mortality. But what if the tired war-metaphor is getting it all wrong? Brimming with thought-provoking questions, The Cheating Cell looks at cancer through an evolutionary lens and forces the reader to radically reconsider cancer; not as a bug, but as a feature of life.

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Book review – What Is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design

10-minute read

Advances in medical research mean we have come to grips with numerous diseases and health conditions over the decades. But, like a game of whack-a-mole, you solve one set of problems to only have other, often more complex problems take their place. There is valid criticism to be had of medicine and its reductionist approach and What Is Health? sees neurobiologist Peter Sterling offer a critique grounded in physiology.

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Book review – Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

7-minute read

So far, most of the books I have read on the COVID-19 pandemic have either been of the backwards-looking, how-did-we-get-here type, or have dealt with practical virological, epidemiological, or immunological details. I picked up Apollo’s Arrow as it promised a forward-looking perspective while drawing parallels with past pandemics. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and sociologist directing the Human Nature Lab in Yale, got drafted into working on the pandemic from the start, tracking the spread of the virus, and sat at the bedside of many dying patients while working as a hospice doctor in New York. I believe we need to hear these frontline stories.

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Book review – The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis

8-minute read

This review is a case of one book leading to another. When I read Carl Benedikt Frey’s The Technology Trap, one argument he raised as to why the Industrial Revolution arrived as late as it did, was the resistance to innovation by guilds. But beyond certain vague and probably romantic notions, what do I really know about medieval guilds? And thus I found myself sitting down with The European Guilds, a hefty 645-page book by economic historian Sheilagh Ogilvie, published in The Princeton Economic History of the Western World series. This meticulously argued book crushes the idea that guilds served the common good. Instead, argues Ogilvie, through their profiteering they held Europe in an economic stranglehold that lasted for centuries.

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Book review – How to Make a Vaccine: An Essential Guide for COVID-19 & Beyond

7-minute read

A pandemic is probably a good moment to understand how vaccines are developed and how they work. This short and educational primer offers relevant background information on viruses and the immune system, and goes into much more detail on vaccines than other recent introductory books. How to Make a Vaccine is written by immunologist John Rhodes who brings to the table both his background in academic research on vaccines and his experience working for GlaxoSmithKline from 2001 to 2007. His narrative approach of choice is to tell the story of viruses, immunology, and vaccines through the history of scientific discovery.

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Book review – A Planet of Viruses (Third Edition)

5-minute read

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many publishers have seen an opportunity to reissue previously published books on viruses and pandemics. As a reader, it is always difficult to know whether you are actually getting any updated content beyond the obligatory new preface or afterword, or whether this is just a quick cash-grab. Fortunately, the third edition of Carl Zimmer’s famous virology primer A Planet of Viruses is here to prove those suspicions wrong.

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Book review – Viruses, Pandemics, and Immunity

6-minute read

Last year August, science writer Ed Yong put it very nicely: “you see, the immune system is very complicated“. Yet, understanding it is important to understanding how the COVID-19 pandemic might evolve, why we are faced with certain public health measures, and how we can hope to combat the pandemic with tests and vaccines. In this brief book, physics and chemistry professor Arup K. Chakraborty and immunologist Andrey S. Shaw offer a general introduction to how our immune system reacts to viruses, and how our medical inventions help out.

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Book review – Cataclysms: An Environmental History of Humanity

6-minute read

What is the price of humanity’s progress? The cover of this book, featuring a dusty landscape of tree stumps, leaves little to the imagination. In the eyes of French journalist and historian Laurent Testot it has been nothing short of cataclysmic. Originally published in French in 2017, The University of Chicago Press published the English translation at the tail-end of 2020.

Early on, Testot makes clear that environmental history as a discipline can take several forms: studying both the impact of humans on the environment, and of the environment on human affairs, as well as putting nature in a historical context. Testot does all of this in this ambitious book as he charts the exploits of Monkey—his metaphor for humanity—through seven revolutions and three million years.

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Book review – Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us or the Environment

9-minute read

The best way to introduce this book is to quote the first sentence of the blurb: “Techno-Fix challenges the pervasive belief that technological innovation will save us from the dire consequences of the 300-year fossil-fuelled binge known as modern industrial civilization“. Stinging, provocative, and radical, Techno-Fix puts its fingers on many a sore spot with its searing critique.

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